They got better - Love this band--and I m probably one of the few people who like their new material more, and believe they got better as musicians. This album--as much as I like it fierceness, is almost unlistenable. The band is all over the place, some of the stuff just doesn t connect. When it does, like on Flood Of Red and Mistakes And Regrets, it predicts better things to come on the Source Tags & Codes album, where their sound and songs just gelled better. Trail of Dead definitely have (had) their own thing going: it s not quite punk, it s not at all prog, but it borrows liberally from these genres and more. The scattershot singing and sections where the band all get off-time here just seem to belie a dashed-off quality in the recording. Sometimes that can be a good thing, but with material as thin as this, it just grates.
...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead: Madonna - It s very awesome and totally sweet. Still not as good as Worlds Apart, that s why i gave it a 4 stars
Good, but not great - Madonna has some great tracks and a few alright tracks. Listening to the whole album can seem monotonous. I am glad i bought it though, the great songs on here more than make up for the alright ones.
A Perfect Teenhood? - The first ...Trail of Dead album I had heard was Source Tags and Codes. That album left me feeling ecstatic at the thought that I d stumbled into a band this awesome. And then I heard Madonna. This album is everything good off of Source Tags... and so much more. This album really seems to move in a way that Source Tags and Codes can t compare with. The songs move from disillusionment and then to despair and finally in A Perfect Teenhood to hatred. And it s not so much the vocals or lyrics that portray these moods so much as the intense and emotionally charged playing. A lot of noise rock bands could only do that, but TOD seems to be able to take that and apply it much more ferociously than their forefathers like My Bloody Valentine or Sonic Youth really never came close to. Madonna is my favorite ...Trail of Dead album. This album is for anyone who loved Sonic Youth s Sister and wondered why more albums like this were never produced.
Serviceable but not enough - This album is loud indie rock background music. Its fine for cleaning your house to but probably not something to sit down and listen to closely.The drummer seems to be much more advanced then his bandmates and does a lot of interesting things on the recording. However, this does not make up for the lack of good musical decisionmaking shown by the singer. While yelling is a viable and valid choice for vocalists (See At the Drive In, Rage Against the Machine), the vocalist here manages to yell in a monotone, something I previously thought impossible. He also has an irritating habit of emphasizing the last word in sentences. The final song ,Sigh Your Children, on the album downplays his weaknesses and is the most successful song on the recording.The album is not terrible but does nothing to interest me in this band s previous or subsequent recordings ,so in that sense, it was a failure.